After a long season that began in early September, the Herndon All Star Tournament traditionally marks the end of the Fall season just before Thanksgiving. Given little time to assemble a cohesive team of All Stars, it's a tall order for the coaches to prepare their teams...and one thing they have to do which they never encounter during the regular season is get the players ready for the eventuality of "penalty kicks", the dreaded answer to a tie game at the end of regulation time. Whether Bryan Kirchner practiced them with his U10 Girls is unknown.  There's almost no doubt that Mac Squires and his fellow coaches did it with the U19's, pictured right, after their semi-final victory.

Congratulations to the U10 Girl, pictured below, for doing it "easily", only needing to score three PK goals to overcome a team from the Fairfax Police Youth Club (FPYC) to earn their championship trophy, after also going to a PK shootout in their semi-final victory.

Meanwhile, the U19 Girls did it the hard way just to get to the finals. In their semi-final match vs. Annandale (ABGC), after a 1-1 draw in regulation it took no fewer than twelve shots to score ten goals while the Annandale girls were stopped on three shots and fell by a score of 10-9. It happened that this reporter/photographer was there for the semi final game and got about 80 action photos which are posted on the BRYC Soccer Facebook page. Below are just a few photos from the 10-9 shootout, including the unusual calm which the two goalies exhibited in friendly conversation before it began, a near miss, the winning shot, and the winning save.

It happened again in the finals where the girls tied with Vienna 0-0 in regulation and again it came down to PK's to decide who would take home the Championship trophies. This time it took the BRYC ladies only four shots to defeat their HGHSL friends by a score of 4-2. CONGRATULATIONS to the U10's and the U19's for their exciting tournament wins, and to all the teams who participated for playing with great sportsmanship for which we are known and showing the BRYC colors so well.

Finally, our sincere apologies to the coaches, parents, and six teams who were scheduled to play on the Baron Cameron grass fields in Reston and were denied that chance when the Fairfax County Park Authority unexpectedly closed the park for the entire weekend due to wet field conditions...a fact that wasn't known until it was too late for the Herndon tournament organizers to do anything about it. We hope our efforts to salvage some kind of games on Sunday were of some compensation. We and the tournament are truly sorry for what transpired.